Nar. umjet. 49/1, 2012, pp. 722, S. Czerny, Dogs Dont Speak. A consideration...

Original scientific paper Received: Feb. 1, 2012 Accepted: Feb. 24, 2012
UDK 591.5:572]

Sarah Czerny
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Rijeka, Rijeka

Dogs DoNT Speak. A Consideration

of the Flow of Knowledge between
Dogs, Anthropologists and Humans
Within anthropological studies of the human-animal relation much has been written
about the objectification of animals in Euro-American ontology and the need to
reconsider this approach. Yet, although Euro-American ontologies on the humananimal relation have been the focus of critique, I suggest that the question of how
we might reconsider this issue is still pertinent. In this article, I offer an ethnographic
account of dog owner narratives on the dog-owner relation in Croatia. Through a
consideration of these narratives in terms of the flow of knowledge (cf. Strathern
2004), I propose that knowledge between humans and animals is already flowing but
it has just not been made visible as such.
Key words: animal-human relation, knowledge production, flow

Unequal Exchanges
In anthropological writing on the human-animal relation, a number of authors
(e.g. Shanklin 1985; Ingold 1988; Noske 1993; Mullin 1999) have pointed out
that anthropological interest in this relation has taken quite a distinct focus for
some time: namely, it focuses on what the humans are doing in these relations.
For example, in Mullins (1999) overview of the anthropological treatment of the
human-animal relation, she writes:
My impression is that scholars studying human-animal relationships seem to vary
considerably in their attitudes toward animals, to the extent that these can be discerned, but Noske is right that sociocultural research in this area tends to be much
if not more concerned with humans relationships with other humans and has rarely
departed from anthropocentrism. (Mullin 1999:217)

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One consequence of this interest in humans is that in these accounts animals end
up taking the guise of animate objects who only become animate because of
the interests and needs of humans. In light of this, recently there has been an
increasingly audible call (e.g. Kohn 2007; Nadadsy 2007; Candea 2010) for a
reconsideration of how anthropologists might analytically approach the humananimal relation. Some scholars have argued that the anthropological analytical
gaze should be opened up to include the interests of animals, where the relation
between humans and animals is considered in terms of being a social relation.
They argue this because, in their research, they have observed instances of humananimal sociality, where the humans in such relations consider animals as persons.
Although humans in these relations say that animals see the world in a different1
way, they regard the knowledge that animals offer about the world to be just as
meaningful as the knowledge that humans offer.
Nevertheless, these scholars highlight the presence of a formidable road block,
which they argue needs to be addressed before it is possible to do this. This is
that Western or Euro-American ontologies frequently do not treat animals as
persons, but instead place them into a hierarchical relation where they are considered to be lower or lesser beings than humans. As Nadadsy (2007) has written
[V]ery few Euro-American scholars are willing to accept the proposition that
animals might qualify as conscious actors capable of engaging in social relations
with humans (Nadadsy 2007:29). Therefore, the question arises as to how can
we as anthropologists employ an analytical framework that considers the relation
between humans and animals as a relation between persons, while at the same
time acting as participants2 in an ontological setting that has a propensity to depersonalise them?
In this article, I want to consider this question by offering an account of the way
dog owners in Croatia negotiated their relations with their dogs. I do this because
according to my observations of the way dog owners spoke about their dogs,
their narratives appeared to be much more in keeping with non-Euro-American
discourses on the human-animal relation than with Euro-American discourses.
As I will examine in the first half of this article, although all the owners I spoke
with maintained a conceptual difference between themselves and their dogs, in
that they saw themselves as being members of different species, I do not think
1

Viveiros de Castros (1998) account on perspectivism considers this point extensively.

In his consideration of the distinction between Melanesian and non-Melanesian knowledge

practices, which shares many parallels with the Euro-American/non-Euro-American distinction,
Gell (1996) writes [T]he Melanesia of GG [Gender of the Gift] is not the actual nation states of
Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and so on, but a manner of speaking, or more
precisely the site of certain problems of expression and understanding, peculiar to the cultural project
of anthropology, which is (almost) exclusively a western project, like it or not (Gell 1996:34).
2

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it would be possible to state that any of them saw their dogs as animate objects.
Rather, they offered numerous instances of how what their dogs had told them
had influenced the course of their everyday practices and their relations with other
humans. In their opinion, what their dogs told them was just as meaningful as
what other humans told them, and thus they appeared to treat their relations with
their dogs as a social relation that was of the same importance to them as their
social relations with other humans. In light of this observation, I think it could be
therefore very informative to reflect upon how dog owners are constructing, and
representing this relation with their dogs. If in the Euro-American ontological setting dog owners are able to consider their relations with their dogs as equal social
relations, then how might their practices inform ours? What are they doing that is
different?
In order to contemplate this, in the second section I will place these accounts
offered by dog owners in a comparative position with academic discourses about
animal knowledge. Taking Stratherns (2004) account on the travels of knowledge
in academic social relations as the starting point for my discussion, I suggest that
dog owners are in a position to treat their dogs knowledge in this way because
they are offering them in a field of social relations that enables them to do so.
What they present as dog knowledge is the product of their individual observations about their dogs practices. However, within academic social relations these
observations would most probably not be considered as knowledge at all. This is
because in the academic field of social relations, observations about animals are
required to go through the scientific process before they can be presented to others as knowledge, and it is these different approaches to knowledge that I discuss
at the end of this article.

The Responsibilities of Ownership

To begin, I am going to draw out in detail how dog owners considered this notion
of ownership in their relations with their dogs. All the persons I spoke to referred to
themselves as the owners of their dogs, and at first glance, their employment
of the label3 owner would appear to implicitly infer that they saw their dogs as
being a form of property. In turn, this would seem to negate any notion that these
owners saw themselves as being in a relation with other social persons. Within the
body of literature that focuses on animal rights and animal welfare (e.g. Francione
1995; Cavalieri 2001; Hauser et al 2006; Singer 2006), the notion of animals as
property is one that has been much criticised. The argument is offered that by
giving animals the legal status of property, and thus by putting them in a position
3
Borkfelt (2011) offers a detailed discussion on how the act of naming affects human relations
with animals.

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where they can be owned, they are reduced to objects and the apparent hierarchy
in the human-animal relation is reinforced. It is for this reason that some scholars
propose that the legal status of animals needs to be changed, where animals are
granted the status of legal personhood (cf. Francione 1995). However, for my
purposes here, I do not want to enter into a detailed discussion of the intricacies
of the debates in the literature on animal rights and animal welfare. Rather, I will
outline in more detail how dog owners treated ownership as more a relation of
responsibility than the possession4 of a thing. This sense of responsibility on the
part of the owners appeared to come from what they saw was a need to help their
dogs negotiate the human world.
Nearly all of the dog owners described their dogs as no longer living in their
natural habitat, and this appeared to have substantial implications for the form
their relation took. Very often they explained that when dogs lived in their natural state they roamed in packs and survived on their instincts,5 as they claimed
their dogs ancestors the wolves had done. However, these owners argued, due to
the fact they were now living with humans in a city, their dogs were no longer
able to rely on their natural instincts or the pack. In fact, now that their dogs
were living in this human world, their dogs natural instincts were a source of
concern for their owners since they were worried they might work against them.
For instance, one owner told me how she tried to make sure that her dog did not
eat things when they were outside. She said that when she discovered him chewing something when they were on a walk, she would order him to spit it out. Her
explanation was that although it was probably his natural instinct to eat any food
he finds, in that this is what he would do in the wild, in this context it was dangerous because someone might have laced some morsels with poison. She said that
he could not know how bad some humans can be, and therefore she felt that
it was her responsibility to use the knowledge she had about humans to protect
him. Another area where owners foregrounded the responsibility they had towards
their dogs was when they spoke about their dogs health care. They all said that
when their dog was ill they would take them to the vet, and nearly all of the owners whom I spoke with said that after they had been to the vet, if their dog had a
more serious condition, they would read more about it on the Internet. Again, they
voiced this in terms of responsibility, in that it was the responsible thing to do,
to use all the knowledge they had available to them as humans for the benefit of
It is not possible to assume that all ownership relations imply possession (cf. Strathern 1999).
It was in these conversations that often the television personality Cesar Millan (2006) was
mentioned. The owners would say that they found his programmes and books very helpful in understanding their dogs. When I asked them why they said because in his programmes and books he
offered the dogs perspective, and in this way helped to explain to them things that their dogs were
saying that they had not previously understood. They said that what they liked about his approach
was that he treated dogs as dogs, rather than dogs as humans. See Millan (2006:11) for an example
of his dogs as dogs approach.
4
5

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their dogs. Subsequently, my impression of these owners narratives was that they
considered themselves as gatekeepers for their dogs who were now living in a
human world. Since their dogs were no longer in their own or natural world,
owners saw themselves as being in a constant negotiation between their dogs
natural instincts and needs, and the needs of the human world in which their dogs
were living. On the basis of this, and to return to their dogs status as property,
I would therefore propose that at no point did this ownership relation result in the
owners considering their dogs as animate objects.
Nonetheless, although owners foregrounded what appeared to me to be a moral
responsibility in their relations with their dogs, it would not be possible to say that
the legal obligations in this relation were totally absent. All the owners told me
that as dog owners they had certain legal obligations, such as the need to vaccinate
their dogs, and that in the city legally their dogs should wear a muzzle and be on
a lead. When I asked them about other legal obligations of this relation, such as
the ones set out in the Law on Animal Protection and the City of Rijekas Ordinance on how pets should be kept, they said they were not aware of them. All of
the owners, bar one, stated that they had never read these Ordinances or Laws, or
the pamphlet published by the City of Rijeka entitled What do you need to know
about pets? (Mijanovi et al. 2006) that offers a summarised outline of these Ordinances and Laws. Thus, in terms of their understanding of the legal relation, it
appeared these owners had not reflected upon their legal obligations too deeply.
However, when they spoke about the issue of dog-training, the legal aspect of this
relation did become an issue. Nearly all the owners spoke of the importance of
training their dogs and teaching them to listen to their commands. When I asked
them why they were so keen that their dogs behave in these prescribed ways, they
offered the point that they wanted their dog to be good and listen to them so
that they could be outside when they wanted. One woman told me that her dog
never listened to her and that she wished he would because then they would be
able to go to the park to play with other dogs. She explained that in the wild
her dog would most probably sort it out with the other dogs as they would in
the wild, but because they were living in the city she could have problems with
the other owners if this were to happen. She told me that she was worried that the
other owners might sue her if her dog bit their dogs, especially as the law said that
they should be on a lead and muzzled at all times. As she said I am not worried
about the other dogs, I am worried about the humans, by law if he bit another dog
and was declared aggressive he could be put to sleep, and that is why I need to
protect him. It is her point that as the owner she would be sued because of her
dogs actions that I want to consider in detail now. This sense of responsibility that
dog owners so often foregrounded when talking about their relations with their
dogs is perhaps the result of one quite distinctive feature of this relation. This is
its singular quality, where it would seem that in human social relations, owners
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are considered by others, and consider themselves, to be the only meaningful, or

perhaps visible, humans in their dogs lives.
An area where this singular quality of the dog-owner relation was most apparent concerns what happens to dogs bodies after they have died. The issue of
what to do with the bodies of their dogs after they have died was one that was of
considerable worry for many owners. They told me that by law they were not allowed to bury their dogs, and instead must send them to be burned in a furnace in
another part of Croatia. Many of them described this practice as being inhuman.
However, in one part of Rijeka there is a graveyard for animals, and although it
is not officially in use anymore there are still a number of animal graves there.
Quite a few of these graves have been built using the same materials that are the
same shape and size as the graves in the human graveyard. When I told other
persons that I was interested in the graveyard for animals, many responded that
this practice of burying dogs and other animals in this way was not normal and
some persons reacted quite strongly. When I asked them why they felt so strongly
about this, they told me it was not right to bury a dog in a human-like grave.
They said that although they could understand that persons loved their dogs and
wanted to give them an appropriate burial, building a grave like this for them was
wrong. At first I interpreted their negative reactions in terms of a reaction to
what they saw as a transgression6 of the boundaries they perceived were present
in the human-animal relation. By burying their dogs in a human-like grave, they
were giving their dogs a human-like status. Yet, a comment by one man suggested
otherwise, or perhaps offered a more nuanced interpretation of the nature of this
transgression. He said that the problem he found with humans burying their dogs
in this way was because he didnt see the point of it. Upon my enquiring what
he meant by this he said that these graves were an act of self-indulgence on the
part of the owner. He explained that he felt part of the reason why humans build
graves for other humans is so that the family has somewhere to visit, whereby
graves offer a focal point for the grief of those left behind. However, he argued
that in the case of dogs, the only person who will want or need to visit this grave
is the owner since this is the only human relation the dog has. He posited that
there will be no visits by relatives to visit the dogs grave on All Saints Day, nor
will friends of the dog pass by to light a candle on his grave. Thus, in his eyes the
source of the owners indulgence was that the owners had built a grave that only
they would visit.
Irrespective of whether one accepts his argument that the construction of graves
is predominately motivated by the need for bereaved persons to have somewhere
to visit, it is his point that owners are the only meaningful human relation that
dogs have that I want to consider. From the position of an observer one might
6
In light of the edited edition by Giffney and Hird (2006) Queering the non/human, one might
describe this transgression as a queering of the human-animal relation.

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be tempted to argue otherwise, in the sense that dogs might postulate they have
other meaningful human relations [such as neighbours, vets, other members of the
household]. Nevertheless, according to the owners [as well as others] conceptualisation of this relation, their dogs become visible7 both in the human world, and
in human social relations, through the relation of ownership. On the basis of the
narratives offered by dog owners above, one might say that they conceive of the
ownership relation as being a linking device8 between two worlds their dogs
previous natural world and the human world. Thus, in terms of the flow of
knowledge between dog owners and their dogs, the singular quality9 of this relation results in all human knowledge passing through the owner to her dog. One
might say that the humans in this relation act as filters, or funnels, through which
human knowledge must flow. Even visits to the vets involved this act of funnelling, whereby the owners had to first take their dog to the vet in order for the vet
to be able to apply their human knowledge to the dog.
However, on the basis of the owners narratives on this relation, knowledge
does not only flow in a unidirectional fashion, it also flows10 from dogs to their
owners. In my conversations with dog owners, they often told me that their dogs
had told them things. A number of owners said that their dogs told them a lot
about the character of another human from the way they reacted to that person.
For instance one man told me that he knew for certain that his neighbour was a bad
person from the way his dog reacted. He told me that he had always had doubts
about this particular neighbour, but it was only when his dog had started growling
at him that his suspicions were confirmed. He explained that it was because of
this that he was always very cautious in his dealings with this neighbour. In addition to this, I also observed that dog knowledge can inform the practices of other
humans through the mediation of their owners. On one occasion a group of about
eight of us were walking in the dark on a path towards a mountain refuge where
we had arranged to stay the night. On the one side of the path there was a field,
See Stratherns (1999:3-6) discussion on the ethnographic moment for further consideration
of the role of time in the ethnographic project.
8
This link is further evident when one thinks about stray dogs. In the absence of this human
connection, even though they are still very much present in the world, being ownerless they appear
less visible in the field of human relations. It would be interesting to think about this in terms of
Malkkis (1992) discussion on rootlessness.
9
In my mind, it is the singularity of this relation that makes it notable in comparison to other
relations. For instance, in kinship relations (i.e. parents-children), children are still considered to
have meaningful relations with other persons. It is perhaps this singularity that creates the intimate
effect of this relation between dogs and their owners. See Kuzniars (2006:107-135) discussion on
Intimacy.
10
I think we can see this flow of dog knowledge in other areas, such as in those dog-human relations where dogs are labelled as working or service dogs and where the owners become labelled as
handlers. Other examples of relations where dog knowledge informs the practices of humans are between police dogs and their handlers, service dogs and their owners, and sniffer dogs and doctors.
7

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and on the other side there was a very thick forest. One of the people on the walk
had brought his dog with him, and he was at the front of the group walking with
his owner. Since it was winter and quite icy, we were walking very carefully in
a row. Everyone was holding onto each other or their bags that they had brought
with them for the night. There was a bright moon so although it was dark it wasn't
pitch black. The atmosphere was very light-hearted. People were joking and teasing each other about who was going to fall over on the ice first and talking about
how walking on such icy ground in the dark was probably not a sensible thing to
be doing. But after about ten minutes of walking, suddenly the dog stopped dead
in his tracks, and started to bark. He was looking in the direction of the forest, was
growling and barking, and was in a hunched position that looked like he was ready
to attack something. Since we were walking in a row, and the front of the group
had stopped, we all stopped. One of the members of the group asked the owner
whether this was normal, if his dog normally stopped in his tracks and barked like
this. The owner replied that it wasn't at all normal, that he must see something in
the forest since he never did this on walks usually. The atmosphere in the group
changed from being one of merriment to seriousness. Even though it had been the
source of teasing only a few moments earlier, someone commented that it was really actually very stupid to be walking in the dark on the edge of forest, especially
considering that it was a known fact that the forest had bears in it. Someone else
asked the dogs owner whether they thought he had seen a bear. The owner said
that they had no idea what his dog had seen, but that he had definitely seen something. The dog was still looking in the direction of the forest and barking. We all
agreed to carry on walking, but the mood in the group had changed greatly. Rather
than being a noisy joking atmosphere, there was an air of tension and fear. Some
people were whispering about what one was supposed to do if confronted by a
bear, while others were saying that it had to be something else because it was winter and bears were supposed to be hibernating. One person, in what appeared to be
an attempt to alleviate the tension, said that maybe the dog had got it wrong and
had seen something that wasn't there. But this suggestion was rebuked by the rest
of the group where they offered the argument that there was definitely something
there because (a) his owner had said he didn't normally react like this, and (b) they
were sure that dogs can see things that we cannot as humans. The knowledge he
offered through his body language was taken seriously by the majority of the
group. Therefore to sum up, I would suggest that knowledge flows through the
dog-owner relation, between humans and dogs on equal terms.

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Hot House Descriptions

Although, there appeared to be an equal exchange of knowledge between dogs
and their owners, there is, however, a very slight but critical turn in the way
these relations manifest themselves in the field of human relations. Even though
dogs and their owners have this apparently singular relation in that they are what
Haraway (2003) might term a becoming, at the same time, the humans in such
relations are also part of a network of human relations. For instance, earlier I mentioned how one dog owner spoke of her concern that she might be sued by other
dog owners if her dog bit their dogs. If her dog was to bite another dog, she would
be sued by other humans. In being sued, she would enter into an exchange relation
with other owners about her dog, and in these human exchanges her dog would
most probably take on the guise of an object. In terms of the flow of dog knowledge in human social relations something similar occurs: in human exchanges it
also takes on the form of an object. It is this objectification of dog knowledge,
both in non-academic relations and academic relations that I consider now.
One noticeable characteristic about the narratives offered by dog owners
about what their dogs had told them was an apparent lack of concern on their part
as to how these accounts might sound in relation to other human accounts about
dogs. For example, they explained to me that their dogs told them things, that they
warned them about possible dangers from other humans, or they described how
their dogs were sometimes embarrassed or grumpy. Seemingly, the tone of their
accounts about their dogs seemed to take a very similar tone to Darwins (2009
[1890]) account of his dogs hot house face (Darwin 2009 [1890]:3), when he
was disappointed he wasn't going for a walk. In Crists (1999) account, she examines Darwins account of the expression of emotions in animals in detail since
she says that it has been quite often criticised in more recent scholarship as being
anthropomorphic. Due to the apparent similarity in tone and content between the
narratives offered by dog owners on their dogs and Darwins (2009 [1890]) account of his dog, one might therefore be tempted to also describe them in terms
of being anthropomorphic. But I argue that to do so would be problematic. All the
owners I spoke to were extremely aware about the issue of anthropomorphism,
and when I raised the point with them that their narratives might be determined by
some humans as having anthropomorphic qualities, more than once I was told that
those humans who made such comments had obviously never lived with a dog.
It was this response that I found notable, since they did not appear to show
any concern about how their narratives might relate to other narratives about dogs
or what other humans might think of the way they spoke about their dogs. What
makes it notable is that within academic discourses about animals there does appear to be evidence of this concern. For instance, in Nadadsys (2007) article about
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the relation between Cree hunters and animals in North America, he describes an
extraordinary experience that he had with a rabbit and his problems about what
to do with this experience. As he describes during his fieldwork on Cree hunting
practices and beliefs, he set some rabbit snares about half a mile from his cabin,
and whilst the snares were in place, he observed a rabbit escaping from one. Five
days later, he discovered a rabbit outside his house with a snare around its neck,
and was quite certain that it was the same rabbit that he had observed earlier. He
said that he had a very strong impression that the rabbit came looking for me, that
it had quite literally given itself to me (Nadadsy 2007:36), which he describes
as being an experience that fits Cree ontology about the animal-human relation. As he outlines in his article, in Cree ontology of the animal-human relation,
animals regularly speak to humans in this way and thus when he explained what
had happened to Cree persons they offered the same interpretation of the rabbits
behaviour as he had. But for him, it raised the issue of what to do with this
experience and how to treat it analytically. He writes:
No matter how relevant and useful such experiences may be to understanding the
people with whom we work, we tend not to report them for fear of embarrassment
or of becoming the objects of suspicion among our colleagues (the Castada effect). (Nadadsy 2007: 36. Emphasis added)

A further instance of this scholarly concern is visible in Crists (1999:41-49)

discussion on the use of anecdotal evidence in academic discourses about animals. Referring to Griffins writing, she also points out a form of scholarly selfcensorship in scholarly narratives about animals. She writes:
While the official unusability of anecdotal data weeds out the occasional tall tale
with respect to animal capacities, it also excludes exceptional or unique information (ibid.). Further, in connection to the question of animal mind, Griffin has noted
that because of the disparagement of anecdotal data, field observers often fail to
report evidence suggestive of conscious thinking even when they obtain it, and editors of scientific journals are reluctant to publish it (1984:14, 15). (Crist 1999:
40. Emphasis Added)

Thus, in contrast to dog owners who did not express any such apprehensions when
speaking about their dogs, visibly there is scholarly concern as to what they can
and cannot include in their narratives on animals.
Here it is helpful to consider this difference in light of Stratherns (2004) writing on the travels of knowledge. Strathern suggests that in order for knowledge to
be able to travel, it firstly needs to be rendered portable. As she highlights, when
one thinks about academic knowledge production in this way, it becomes apparent
that the transformation of information into knowledge involves what could be described as being an awful lot of work. In the production process, where Strathern
(2004:19) writes that publications are the academic product par excellence, information needs to be gathered, choices have to be made about what information gets
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put into a publication and what is left out, the fledgling product has to be reviewed
by other scholars, its relation to other publications in the form of citations has to
be made visible and so on. It is only when all this has been accomplished that
knowledge becomes visible as a product: in the form of a publication. Strathern
therefore suggests that when contemplating how knowledge is rendered portable,
one should go back a stage to the actual site of the creation of the product, to the
point at which everyone is still working together, and the outcome is still in the
future (Strathern 2004:20). In relation to my interests here, this suggestion by
Strathern (2004) to go back a stage to the point where the outcome is still in the
future is very informative. When one takes ones focus of analysis back a stage
to the site of creation and considers how dog owners spoke about their dogs and
how scholars write about animals, in my mind, there is a noticeable difference.
On the basis of Nadadsys (2007) and Crists (1999) discussions on the exclusion of certain types of knowledge about animals in the academic product, scholars are seemingly moving backwards and forwards in time. During the writing
process, they are already considering the effect of their outcome, the publication,
which at this particular point (at the site of creation) is still in the future. Due to
their concern that certain observations might have a detrimental effect on the projected outcome of their product, they then appear to return to the present where
they choose to filter them out. In contrast, dog owners do not appear to move
backwards and forwards in time. And one might interpret this absence of timetravel in the case of the dog owners as a result of there being an absence of a
projected product or outcome, at least on their part. When offering their narratives
about dogs, dog owners did not have to consider the effects of these narratives on
the outcome or product. In this particular situation, and in what can be described
as a not quite replication (Strathern 1991) of their role as mediators between
their dogs and the human world, concerns over the outcome or product rest upon
my shoulders (as the author of this text). Once again, in a not quite replication of
what they were doing in their relation with their dogs, as the author of this article
I am the one who negotiates their interests and the interests that are present in
what one might call the academic field of social relation. This, as a wealth of anthropological knowledge has argued, involves an act of mediation or translation,
which one might say is similar to what dog owners are engaging in when they are
negotiating their dogs interests with the interests of other humans.

Hierarchies of Knowledge
It is with this in mind that I want to return to the issue I outlined at the beginning of
this article. How might the relation between dogs and their owners help us in our
considerations of how to construct an analytical framework that treats the animal17

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human relation as a social relation? It seems to me that that there are a number of
things we might learn from dog owners, but I will only focus my discussion on
one point here. This concerns the way in which dog owners maintain a conceptual
difference between humans and dogs, but at the same time do not consider this
difference in terms of hierarchy. In terms of knowledge, their dogs knowledge
had the influence to inform their practices as much as human knowledge did. As
in the example of the dogs reaction to a creature in the forest that I offered earlier,
sometimes they treated what their dogs were telling them to be more informative11
than what humans were saying. Yet, in Crists (1999) account on what counts as
anecdotal evidence in scholarly descriptions of animals, the discourses offered
by dog owners would seem to fit under the auspices of anecdotes in that they
are singular instances of animal behaviour (Crist 1999:40). Within the field of
academic social relations, these narratives would most probably be considered
to be anecdotes about dogs and not knowledge about dogs at all. They have
not been through the scientific process of corroboration (peer review), scholarly
discussion, any analysis of their relation to other knowledge products, and so on.
In turn, I think it is also plausible to conjecture that outwith the field of academic social relations a similar distinction might be made between the knowledge
offered by dog owners and the knowledge offered by scientists. As a reader interested in dog behaviour, one might take an ethological text about dog behaviour
more seriously than an account offered by a dog owner with no scholarly training.
In turn, anthropological knowledge about animals is also quite probably going
to be considered less valid than the knowledge offered by other scholars who
are specialists in the field of animal behaviour. Ever since the time of Aristotle
and even earlier, in the Euro-American context, the decisive line of difference
between humans and animals has very often been held up as being the point
that animals do not speak, or perhaps more pertinently they do not write. At first
glance, this might seem a rather tired observation to make, but in my mind it has
very serious implications. It seems unlikely, at least for the time being, that animals
are going to be able to exchange their knowledge with humans as equal partners
in academic knowledge exchanges. In academic knowledge exchanges, animals
will continue to require a human to represent them.12 This has considerable
consequences in terms of the issue of how we, as anthropologists, might construct
an analytical framework that treats the human-animal relation as a social relation.
Observations about animal relations and animal practices are left to the experts,
In my mind, the way dog owners see animal knowledge is summed up by a point made by
Viveiros de Castro (1998) in his writing on Amerindian perspectivism about how animals see. He
writes: [A]nimals see in the same as we do different things because their bodies are different from
ours (Viveiros de Castro 1998:478).
12
In fact one might be tempted to state that it is this act of representation that makes animals
animals.
11

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who are trained to read the body language of animals. One might say that as
anthropologists, we are trained as ethnologists but not ethologists. This is a point
that has been mentioned by others. For instance, in a discussion about whether
anthropologists should take a less anthropocentric approach in their research and
also focus on animals, Mullin (1999) makes the point that such an approach [It]
does raise a number of problems for anthropologists, just one being the fact that
very few of them know much about animals other than primates (and most know
extremely little about primates than other humans) (Mullin 1999:217). But has
this problem always been present? Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) have pointed
out that [S]tudies of animals have a long lineage in anthropology, traveling back
canonically to texts such as Lewis Henry Morgans 1868 The American Beaver
and His Works (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010:549). Although one could argue
that Morgans (1868) interest in beaver practices was to gain an insight into human practices, and thus direct similar criticisms to the ones I outlined at the outset
of this article, what I find thought-provoking is that as an anthropologist he was
able to publish a book about beaver practices.
I find this thought provoking because a seemingly more recent development in
academic social relations appears to be an interest in who is qualified to speak
about animals, and in my mind this is closely connected to the wider and much
discussed issue of who owns knowledge. This is where I think we can learn from
dog owners. According to the way they approach the notion of ownership in their
relation with their dogs, they see it as a relation of responsibility and negotiation
between two different fields of interests and needs. They do not, however, consider
themselves to own their dogs as things. Neither do they regard dogs as products,
nor do they see their dogs knowledge as a human product. Indeed, what at times
makes their dogs knowledge more informative to them than human knowledge is
the very point that it is not human knowledge. Nevertheless, because this relation
is labelled as an ownership relation in human social relations, dogs become visible
in their owners, and in turn, owners become visible in their dogs. Thus, even
though dog owners see a difference between themselves and their dogs, others
may not read their relation in this way.
I think that it is more than possible to relate this point to academic social relations. As the authors of our texts, we give them our names, and we are seen by
others as the owners of these texts. In addition, when we speak of others texts,
we refer to them using the name of the author. Thus, the knowledge within these
texts is often considered to be owned by the authors. But, in academic social
relations, if ownership was approached in the same way as dog owners approach
it, the relation between the knowledge offered in these texts and the author would
alter. In the anthropological project, we would become representatives of the
knowledge of our informants, where their knowledge becomes visible inour
texts, but we could not claim to own it. For example, from this perspective and
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in relation to this particular text, although I have put my name on this particular academic product, the knowledge that makes up this text includes knowledge
from dogs, rabbits, meerkats and humans. It is, in effect, a multi-species or multianimal knowledge product, and yet it is presented and will be treated in academic
social relations as being solely a human knowledge product. As Crist (1999) has
so thoroughly described in her account of the mechanomorphic treatment of animals, in academic knowledge production, animal knowledge that is made visible
in academic products is shaped by the conventions and practices of that particular
specialism. And furthermore, considering the point offered by Nadadsy (2007)
in his discussion of what to do with the exchange he had with a rabbit, any (potential) knowledge products that fall outside the boundaries of these conventions
and practices are often regarded as being highly questionable.
Therefore, in terms of how we might analytically approach the animal-human
relation as a social relation, and following the example of how dog owners treat
their dogs knowledge, I propose that it might be very worthwhile to consider
animal knowledge as a product in its own right. From this starting point, we could
then turn to investigate ethnographically how animal products become visible
in the field of human social relations (both academic and non-academic). For instance, how does the knowledge offered by a police sniffer dog become transformed into legal evidence that is meaningful in human relations? This may seem
a rather experimental suggestion in that it would require taking animal knowledge
seriously, and treating it as an artefact in its own right, but I would argue that
those anthropologists who have advocated treating their informants knowledge
practices in this way have already demonstrated how much can be gained from
such an approach.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank all the persons whose knowledge makes up this text. I
would also like to thank Ms. Julijana Grizelj-Siroti for her help with finding the relevant laws and
ordinances on animal welfare. Finally, I would like to thank the students who attended the course
Cultural Geography [2011/12] at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka for their
insightful comments on the animal/human relation.

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Psi ne govore. razmatranja o protoku znanja

izmeu pasa, antropologa i ljudi
SAETAK
Paul Nadadsy (2007) se u prikazu ljudsko-ivotinjske drutvenosti u Yukonu osvre na zazor
antropologa prema doslovnom shvaanju narativa koji komunikaciju izmeu ivotinja i kazivaa
predstavljaju kao recipronu i ravnopravnu. Prema njemu se taj zazor moe vezati uz injenicu da
su antropoloke teorije o odnosu ljudi i ivotinja sve do danas onemoguavale antropolozima da taj
odnos sagledaju na bilo koji drugi nain. Antropoloki zazor u lanku razmatram iz perspektive
svojih istraivanja odnosa ljudi i pasa u svakodnevnom ivotu u Rijeci. Dok neki smatraju da se
protok i razmjena znanja izmeu pasa i ljudi odvija u ravnopravnim uvjetima, drugi razmjenu i
protok smatraju limitiranom ime se, ini se, pribliavaju shvaanju odnosa izmeu ljudi i ivotinja
u antropolokim teorijama. Pritom, kao i u antropolokim teorijama, svoje gledite objanjavaju
time to psi ne govore. Navedenu razliku u pristupima u nastavku teksta propitujem etnografski
i usporeujem je s antropolokim tretiranjem odsustva jezika/govora u ivotinja. Tvrdim da bi
antropoloki zazor mogao biti proizvodom znanstvenog mrtvog kuta koji proizlazi iz specifinosti
razmjene i protoka znanja u akademskoj zajednici. Rijei (u obliku usmenih kazivanja ili pisanog
teksta) su medij kojim se u antropolokom polju znanje najee, premda ne nuno, dijeli i razmjenjuje. Potrebno je stoga uzeti u obzir sljedee: u polju u kojem se znanje u pravilu razmjenjuje
rijeima nuno su ograniene mogunosti ravnopravnog tretmana znanja vezanog uz odnos koji ne
poiva na rijeima.
Kljune rijei: ivotinjsko-ljudski odnos, produkcija znanja, protok

22